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[yuriatayde]

Best advice I can give is to have FEW engravers (I make one or two tops, and their only job is engraving, rarely do they do any hauling) and smooth the entire fortress over the course of your first three or so game years. Don't engrave anything yet, they're just getting experience and you need things to happen first.

Sieges, accidents, killing sprees, artifacts, vermin problems, it's all remembered by your engravers for future use. FURTHERMORE, I recommend finding an engraver with an interesting personality, like say, "Whenever possible, he/she prefers to consume cheese" but for an example, I once had an engraver who hated cockroaches... So I got a few engravings of people cowering in the presence of a cockroach.

If you start engraving early, and with low experience engravers, you're going to get blandness all over every wall.

(of further note, smoothing walls never makes a masterpiece, so if you're desperate for experience; smooth out the mining shafts, or dig new tunnels just for training)

[edit] On second thought, having more engravers might lead into more diversity, but the goal is to rank them up before using them so that'll require a lot of wall smoothies.

[Aspgren]

I think it's funny how every engraver went around my fort engraving how all dwarves cheered on "friendly" as he was elected .. that was the name I gave to my first mayor since he had tons of friends. He was the most popular guy around.

Yet. In spite of engraving this crap EVERYWHERE. .. they flat out refused to re-elect him. He died an unmarried engraver ..

 ... oh wait. I think I just found the connection.

[jfs]

Here's an idea. Take a married couple, make them both legendary engravers. Let them have a kid, and let that kid grow up. When the kid's around 6 years old or some so, starve his parents to death and hope he doesn't go mad. Then when he grows up, train him into a legendary engraver himself. He'll probably love to engrave his parents dying, especially if not much else of interest has happened.

[NW_Kohaku]

You can't starve them both - they'll just produce "wasting away" or "fetal position" engravings.

Spike one or dump one in magma, while letting the other get torn apart by a large number of some humorous animal. 

"The Hoary Marmot is laughing.  Urist McArenaBait is making a plaintive gesture.  This engraving refers to the killing of Urist McArenaBait by a hoary marmot in 205."

Alternately, you could have a captured batman kill his parents.

OH THE IRONY! BATMAN KILLED MY PARENTS!  I SHALL DEDICATE MY LIFE TO REVENGE!

[LoneJedi7]

My fort was placed in an intersection between a large goblin empire and a large elf empire.  I can't seem to engrave ANYTHING but goblins murdering elves by the thousands.

I have no idea what it was, but I think I have about 100 engravings (each with unique deaths) about my personal favorite war name: "The Attack Of Stabbing"

i wish i got engravings like that, all my engravings are pictures of "a dwarf and dwarves, the dwarf is surrounded by the dwarves", so boring, and its on EVERYTHING

[Aspgren]

You can't starve them both - they'll just produce "wasting away" or "fetal position" engravings.

Spike one or dump one in magma, while letting the other get torn apart by a large number of some humorous animal. 

"The Hoary Marmot is laughing.  Urist McArenaBait is making a plaintive gesture.  This engraving refers to the killing of Urist McArenaBait by a hoary marmot in 205."

Alternately, you could have a captured batman kill his parents.

OH THE IRONY! BATMAN KILLED MY PARENTS!  I SHALL DEDICATE MY LIFE TO REVENGE!

Make sure he has a high comedian skill!

[darkrider2]

I'm sick of getting the same thing a million times... my legendary engraver will create a "masterpiece" and when take a look at it... its the exact same thing my noob engravers have been engraving on every other wall in the fort.

Sometimes it ain't so bad though, like when I want to give a noble a not so good room I just engrave all the walls and floors until they're happy (and bonus if noble rooms share a wall!)

But I usually only let my history run to about 200 years, I gen big worlds and don't like to wait an eternity...

[madjoe5]

Update: I just got sieged by the orcs, who appeared right next to my wood hauling animal trainer. 20+ stray war dogs charged the orcs and a great battled ensued. About half of my engravings are no about a dog named Steammachine who died after a 3 orc killing spree.

I do have another question: If I build a little underground arena, throw elves, goblins, war dogs, skeletal sharks all to fight each other, would some of it show up on engravings? That would be pretty cool.

[assimilateur]

From my experience, that wouldn't be a reliable way of minimizing uninteresting engravings (I've mentioned above that even after years of sieges I would still get far too many engravings of "dwarves laboring" and shit like that), but at least your war dogs killing stuff - or getting killed - should get depicted. Don't know about fights between wild animals, though, but that would probably get engraved as well.

[Satarus]

If you want good engravings, make a bunch of adventurers from different civs and such.  Have them start some loyalty cascades and such.   Or make some elves and have them killed by dwarves.  Make a darf and have him kill as many elves as possible.  Make your own history and maybe you'll see it.

[darthbob88]

When I had the same problem, I simply put it down as people spending too much time studying civics, or my engraver having the hots for my mayor, since the engravings that didn't relate to either the foundation of the fort or the symbol of our civ were of the ascension of the mayor to leadership. Yet another reason why I appreciate sieges more than I used to.

[Jacob/Lee]

Update: I just got sieged by the orcs, who appeared right next to my wood hauling animal trainer. 20+ stray war dogs charged the orcs and a great battled ensued. About half of my engravings are no about a dog named Steammachine who died after a 3 orc killing spree.

I do have another question: If I build a little underground arena, throw elves, goblins, war dogs, skeletal sharks all to fight each other, would some of it show up on engravings? That would be pretty cool.

Who the hell names a dog steammachine?

All the creatures have standard equal chance but if you get one to kill a dwarf or a dwarf to kill one they will show up in engravings.

[PhilbertFlange]

Is there a way to make engravings a little more, unique? What do you guys do that shows up on engravings that is interesting?

I've found that 100 years usually has enough historical engravings for my liking. Another thing I've seen is that Dig Deeper tends to add a bit more variety (like rotting noble corpses in my king's dining room). The best thing would be to make several death traps (one deep pit for falling deaths, one magma flooding chamber, and one drowning chamber).

Kill sieges/nobles/migrants/elves in as many ways as you can before starting to engrave. After building my pit of death and dropping a 40+ orc siege down it, I engraved most of it with pictures of falling orcs. I find it comical that the orcs come rushing onto an unstable bridge in a room filled with pictures of "the orc is falling."

Also, release hostile animals into rooms filled with kittens/nobles and add some more variety.

[o_O[WTFace]]

Yea every single engraving in my forts is
1)Mayor Re-Elected
2)Foundation of FortName
3)Engraving commemorating last weeks masterwork engraving
4)The theft of a rope reed sock by a Rhesus or a Kobald 

When someone dies they usually get literally 1-2 engravings and every now and then I find engravings about my champions killing unnamed Lizardmen.  Sometimes I let unskilled engravers carve stuff just to mix it up with a few pictures of squares and circles and junk.

 

[orbcontrolled]

There may be nothing to this, but I found my variety of engravings increased dramatically when I put my most creative dwarves on engraving duty rather than just picking any old ones. It's worth a shot.